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Kilmichael Ambush Site

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Comments

  • Registered Users Posts: 108 ✭✭Dr.Nightdub


    Very polite stuff. Unlike the exchange in the Seanad today on another ambush, when Fine Gael Senator Tom Sheahan said Michael Martin 'was not the first Corkman to be shot in the back by a de Valera.' :eek:

    Or as someone said on the Cedar Lounge Revolution blog, does this now mean FF are going to split into pro- and anti-Treaty factions?


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 1,731 ✭✭✭MarchDub


    Very polite stuff.

    On boards it's called the miraculous ability to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear...


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 20,649 ✭✭✭✭CDfm


    Or as someone said on the Cedar Lounge Revolution blog, does this now mean FF are going to split into pro- and anti-Treaty factions?

    LMAO :D


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,646 ✭✭✭washman3


    Very polite stuff. Unlike the exchange in the Seanad today on another ambush, when Fine Gael Senator Tom Sheahan said Michael Martin 'was not the first Corkman to be shot in the back by a de Valera.' :eek:

    Exactly, what a clown to make a statement like that in the Seanad.
    just goes to show where politics is at in this country.
    90 year old civil war politics.
    The irony is if Collins was alive today he would probably plug both of the aforementioned good-for-nothing wastes of oxygen.:mad:


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 20,649 ✭✭✭✭CDfm


    This was a rhetorical question. The basis for it was in relation to the general dismissal of hart in 'Distorting Irish History Two' by Niall Meehan. Its actually an excellent piece of analysis, with some very useful tables but as for its use in the question above, I don't wish to delve any deeper. It was in this context that I asked the question.

    I found this to be one of the oddest threads I have contributed too ever on H & H.

    I didn't get the impression that it was a rhetorical question.I don't know what you were looking for from it & don't want to speculate.

    If you had a question why did you not ask it or if you held a position/belief why not just state it.


    MarchDub wrote: »
    On boards it's called the miraculous ability to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear...

    +1


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  • Registered Users Posts: 3,577 ✭✭✭jonniebgood1


    CDfm wrote: »
    I found this to be one of the oddest threads I have contributed too ever on H & H.

    I didn't get the impression that it was a rhetorical question.I don't know what you were looking for from it & don't want to speculate.

    If you had a question why did you not ask it or if you held a position/belief why not just state it.

    I found it odd also for many reasons and have not enjoyed it. Mostly I contribute on boards because I enjoy learning and shared learning is an important function of a forum. That was my aim in this thread and it has been misunderstood (which I take blame for). As for the last point I asked many questions and made my position clear many times so I don't see why you ask this. Its no big deal to ask awkward questions (although I should have substantiated them better) and we all live and learn. Better to leave it at that IMO.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 588 ✭✭✭R.Dub.Fusilier


    I found it odd also for many reasons and have not enjoyed it. Mostly I contribute on boards because I enjoy learning and shared learning is an important function of a forum. That was my aim in this thread and it has been misunderstood (which I take blame for). As for the last point I asked many questions and made my position clear many times so I don't see why you ask this. Its no big deal to ask awkward questions (although I should have substantiated them better) and we all live and learn. Better to leave it at that IMO.

    the reason you didn't enjoy the thread is because no one agreed with the stance you adopted , except for the OP who didn't even come to you defence.

    you didn't ask awkard questions , IMO , you just got peoples backs up by defending a discredited author , on this subject at least.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,577 ✭✭✭jonniebgood1


    the reason you didn't enjoy the thread is because no one agreed with the stance you adopted , except for the OP who didn't even come to you defence.

    You are incorrect. This is not the reason that I didnt enjoy the thread.
    you didn't ask awkard questions , IMO
    This is your interpretation, others may share it but I disagree.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 20,649 ✭✭✭✭CDfm


    You are incorrect. This is not the reason that I didnt enjoy the thread.


    This is your interpretation, others may share it but I disagree.

    I was very uncomfortable with the approach you took on Meda Ryan's Hart rebuttal and the dialogue that occurred in Cork in its aftermath.

    And, I think others were too.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,577 ✭✭✭jonniebgood1


    CDfm wrote: »
    I was very uncomfortable with the approach you took on Meda Ryan's Hart rebuttal and the dialogue that occurred in Cork in its aftermath.

    And, I think others were too.

    We are all adults here so I accept that people are unhappy about my questions (whether they think they were awkward, uncomfortable, unreasonable or otherwise). Some people are pro-Hart (McGarry, Foster) and most are against (Ryan, Meehan, Murphy) http://www.spinwatch.org/-articles-by-category-mainmenu-8/52-northern-ireland/5394-distorting-irish-history-the-stubborn-facts-of-the-kilmichael-incident . You (and others) are uncomfortable with my approach and I am taken aback at how my approach of asking questions can do this. That will happen on a forum, not everyone agrees. No offence should be taken from this.


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 1,483 ✭✭✭Fenian Army


    MODERATOR> SNIP

    Please refrain from offensive posts. I prefer not to interfere in this way but some common sense would help this.

    Thanks
    moderator


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 1,731 ✭✭✭MarchDub


    Jonnie - I'm not sure the point you are making with the link to Niall Meehan's article on the Hart issue but Meehan carefully explains why Hart's work was so readily and even blindly 'acceptable' in some quarters - most especially within the new wave of historical 'revisionism' that became state dogma essentially. Meehan is not being complimentary to Hart and his supporters.
    I conclude with a discussion of why demonstrable flaws in the [Hart's] research were ignored within professional historiography.
    And he concludes thus:
    Those who opposed repression on civil rights grounds in the 1970s were also marginalised, not least by Conor Cruise O’Brien during his 1973-77 ministerial career, for example when he accused then Senator, former President, Mary Robinson, of being an apologist for killing judges in Northern Ireland. Intellectual opposition to the revisionist project that O’Brien spearheaded was neutralised. As an 'ideological revisionist' (Irish Times, 9 November 1978) O’Brien led the assault on nationalist historiography and promoted its characterisation as a catholic phenomenon.

    The association of revisionism with popular reaction to overt Catholicism was, in essence, a piggybacking operation. Reaction to Catholic institutional dominance was a movement from within Irish society, but was presented as something that transcended and superseded it, a form of ideological post-nationalism that accompanied post-Catholicism. O’Brien managed to link and to construe support for the republican position in the North, or merely political agitation on the worst effects of repression, as support for something generic called ‘violence’. It was as institutionally successful, and ultimately stultifying, in its way as institutional Catholicism had been.

    In these circumstances, historical revisionism appeared to be an intellectual and career building wave of the future. Viewing the past in light of present centred concerns of the elite produced a concept of nationalist narrow mindedness and sectarianism having its roots in the revolutionary period. It is useful to the elite and seemed to make a sort of sense, for which Peter Hart’s The IRA and its Enemies provided evidential detail. Roy Foster continues to promote the theme, recently in ‘How the Catholics became Protestants’, in Luck and the Irish (Penguin, 2009), a book including the observation that those who challenge revisionist views are purveyors, merely, of ‘nationalism with footnotes’.

    The Irish economy today is still dependent (primarily) on US multinational investment using Ireland to penetrate the European market. Expressions of Irish national sovereignty are limited to preventing the European Union from raising such taxes, while relying on the same EU to rescue the currently near bankrupt Irish financial system.

    On the other hand, the northern problem is currently contained within a rigid framework that recognises the irreducibly sectarian basis of the six-county statelet, and for which there is no workable alternative while that state continues to exist. It is the only framework minimally acceptable to nationalists and maximally allowable by unionists.

    In such circumstances of political and economic fragility, a de-motivating, facile and conservative historiography can be a useful thing, since the actual history is considered so thoroughly unsettling. In these circumstances in reaction to bad history Irish historians keep their heads down, their attention fixated on what is directly ahead.
    The ''actual history' that he refers to is not the revisionist one - but the nationalist one that is unsettling for many to actually address.


  • Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 19,219 Mod ✭✭✭✭Bannasidhe


    I presume it is people who took a hardline attitude against the published views of Peter Hart. Some people refused to even consider his methodology given that he was critical of patriots.

    What is your opinion of Harts views R.Dub?

    Just saw this comment jonnie - personally, I was one of those who was highly critical of Hart and it had absolutely nothing to do with how critical he was of 'patriots' but because he did not meet the evidentiary requirements necessary for a scholarly work of history. If the evidence he based his conclusions on was solid - why did his not reveal his sources?

    Every history undergrad has it drilled into them that unless one provides verifiable sources which demonstrate how and why one came to the conclusions one did then these conclusions are nothing more the 'hearsay' and are frankly, in the context of the discipline of history, worthless.

    This was why Hart was 'vilified' - not because of what he said, but because he made controversial statements and when asked to provide his sources (which he should have done automatically) he became vague and claimed to be protecting his sources - that is journalism, not history.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,577 ✭✭✭jonniebgood1


    MarchDub wrote: »
    Jonnie - I'm not sure the point you are making with the link to Niall Meehan's article on the Hart issue but Meehan carefully explains why Hart's work was so readily and even blindly 'acceptable' in some quarters - most especially within the new wave of historical 'revisionism' that became state dogma essentially. Meehan is not being complimentary to Hart and his supporters.

    The Link to the article was just to demonstrate what I had stated, that there were people pro and anti-Hart (he refers to Foster still supporting Harts theme in 2009). I linked Meehan previously and he decimates Harts version of events quite convincingly.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 1,731 ✭✭✭MarchDub


    The Link to the article was just to demonstrate what I had stated, that there were people pro and anti-Hart (he refers to Foster still supporting Harts theme in 2009). I linked Meehan previously and he decimates Harts version of events quite convincingly.

    I know you had given the link previously but did not understand the point you were making because apart from his own points Meehan demonstrates quite well why Foster and others might have clung to Hart without looking closely at the quality of Hart's work at all.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,577 ✭✭✭jonniebgood1


    MarchDub wrote: »
    I know you had given the link previously but did not understand the point you were making because apart from his own points Meehan demonstrates quite well why Foster and others might have clung to Hart without looking closely at the quality of Hart's work at all.

    Meehan breaks it down very well and his view is agreeable to me because of this, As does Seamus Fox also.
    posted by Bannasidhe

    Just saw this comment jonnie - personally, I was one of those who was highly critical of Hart and it had absolutely nothing to do with how critical he was of 'patriots' but because he did not meet the evidentiary requirements necessary for a scholarly work of history. If the evidence he based his conclusions on was solid - why did his not reveal his sources?

    ..

    This was why Hart was 'vilified' - not because of what he said, but because he made controversial statements and when asked to provide his sources (which he should have done automatically) he became vague and claimed to be protecting his sources - that is journalism, not history.

    I agree with this and you explain it clearly. It is reinforced moreso when his research is shown as not being as thorough as it might have been, in the case of Tom Barry's Irish times interview of 1932.


  • Registered Users Posts: 740 ✭✭✭garbanzo


    100th anniversary of this is today.


  • Registered Users Posts: 15,579 ✭✭✭✭whisky_galore


    Regarding the site itself, so much has been altered, bulldozed and landscaped around it over the years that it is valueless from the pov of carrying out battlefield archaeological work which may help shed more light on events.

    https://www.historyireland.com/volume-22/another-controversy-kilmichael/


  • Registered Users Posts: 2,979 ✭✭✭Stovepipe


    It'd be beyond a miracle to find any physical evidence of the ambush, these days. It's not as if they dug trenches or built fortifications or left thousands of empty shell cases behind.


  • Registered Users Posts: 2,979 ✭✭✭Stovepipe


    @bannasidhe, genuine question, but what are "evidentiary requirements for a scholarly work of history"? How deep does a writer have to go?


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  • Registered Users Posts: 15,579 ✭✭✭✭whisky_galore


    Stovepipe wrote: »
    It'd be beyond a miracle to find any physical evidence of the ambush, these days. It's not as if they dug trenches or built fortifications or left thousands of empty shell cases behind.

    I know you're being facetious; bullets, bullet fragments and casings would have been still there if left undisturbed. I can't see any good reason for excessive landscaping.
    It's a miracle someone hasn't built the obligatory "interpretive centre" there.


  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 1,332 ✭✭✭V8 Interceptor


    There has been controversy in recent years leading on from Peter Hart's book "The I.R.A. and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923". As time goes by peoples views change on historical event yet there was a hostile reaction to Harts questioning of events, including Kilmicheal.

    I would be interested in what people think of Harts questioning of the events at Kilmicheal and further afield?

    Hart claimed to have talked to the dead in getting his information.


  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 1,332 ✭✭✭V8 Interceptor


    if you are asking me if there was a false surrender ? my answer would be that i don't care if there was or not as the B&Ts got the same treatment that they gave out. if it was an ordinary british army regiment who were ambushed i would have some sympathy for those killed.

    Barry himself said the Essex regiment were worse than the B&T's/Auxies.


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